ABSTRACT
Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is good enough to deserve a better title. I wish he’d just called it Twisted: meaning strange or perverted, but also, in vernacular usage, confused or misunderstood (as in “don’t get it twisted”). Isolating this double meaning illuminates the double consciousness at work throughout the album, which dropped late last year into a media landscape so hostile to personal expression that misunderstanding was to be expected as well as feared.
